IBM recently announced that
it plans to open a center of excellence in New York City to help financial services
firms adopt open-source virtualization technologies. The KVM Center of
Excellence in New York
is the second such center established by IBM in the past five months. The first
was opened in December in Beijing.
The center will help clients, software engineers and business partners to
quickly leverage open-source virtualization to build cloud-computing platforms.

Kernel-based Virtual Machine
(KVM) is virtualization software designed for Linux and Windows. Virtualization
is used for server and desktop consolidation and cloud computing. KVM is an
alternative to proprietary virtualization software and can help companies
realize significant cost savings and avoid vendor lock-in. According to data
from IDC, the worldwide virtual-machine software market was on track to grow to
over $3.6 billion in 2012, up from $3.0 billion the year before, a 19.3%
year-over-year growth. KVM is growing at 150% year over year in terms of unit
shipments, with over 100,000 servers already using it worldwide for
virtualization.